What 'Design Themes' does for your customers

Design Themes groups products of the same product type that share a design but come in different colorways, so shoppers can compare every color option from a single product page instead of digging through search results. This gives your customers more variety at a glance, and it tidies up the marketplace by cutting down on duplicate listings.

For example, if a customer searches for your pastel polka dot save-the-date card, the top result will show every color variation of that design, letting them pick a color without leaving the page. No more scrolling through pages of near-identical results to find the right shade.

Some product tiles show this in search results too, with color circles displayed underneath the image:

And on the product page itself, customers get a module that lets them toggle between the available colors:

Best Practices for successful Product Grouping

Follow these guidelines when preparing products for Design Themes grouping:

• Do use the same product type for every colorway you want grouped.
• Do focus solely on showcasing different color variations of a single design.
• Do keep text and images in their original position and size across all colorways.
• Do keep the same images in place. Don't add new images or remove existing ones.
• Do use our updated selection of fonts rather than uploading images with fonts baked in, and keep font styles consistent across variations.
• Do leave text as is, unless it's template text you're customizing for the colorway. When you do update template text, keep it a similar length to the original.
• Do keep textures, patterns, objects, and cropping consistent, so the design stays recognizably the same across colorways.
• Do keep all template keys as they are. Don't add, delete, or rename them.
• Do avoid rasterized text. Use editable text instead.

Note: we typically encourage creators not to repeat the same title and tags across products. Design Themes is an exception: keep your title, description, and tags very similar across grouped products, and only change or add keywords that reflect the colorway differences.

How to group your products manually

Zazzle's algorithms are generally accurate at identifying which products belong together, but they can miss subtler similarities. If the algorithm determines your products aren't similar enough for an automatic match, a member of our team will review the request manually. In that case, the review may take longer than 24 hours, depending on request volume.

 If you have designs that should be grouped and haven't been, you can request it manually:

1. Go to the Products tab in your store's dashboard.
2. Select the products you want grouped by checking the box next to each product title. Double-check that every selected product is the same product type.
3. Click the Actions dropdown from any of the selected products.
4. Select Group Products.

That's it. Your request signals our algorithms to review the selected products within 24+ hours.

* Groupings can take up to 24+ hours to take effect depending on workload. 

** Groupings only happen within the same product type. Similar designs across different product types won't be grouped together.